The growing market for mobile devices is placing increasing demands on wireless networks. Indeed, at the end of 2009, the number of mobile phone subscribers exceeded 4.6 billion worldwide, and the global mobile data traffic has been predicted to double every year through 2014. As a result, a crucial challenge for next generation wireless networks is to cope with the rapid increase in multimedia traffic with minimal impact on equipment complexity.
The 4th generation (4G) wireless standards require stationary speeds of 1 giga bits-per-second (Gbps) and mobile speeds of 100 mega bits-per-second (Mbps), while the third generation (3G) standards only required stationary speeds of 2 Mbps and mobile speeds of 384 kilo bits-per-second (Kbps). That is, 4G requires 500 and 260 times faster speeds than 3G in the stationary and mobile cases, respectively. Thus, the need for low-cost performance-multiplying technologies is expected to become significant for wireless networks in the near future.
Techniques are therefore needed for providing fast, efficient, and reliable data transfer operations that are suitable for use in high traffic wireless networks and other systems.